Killers_ The Most Barbaric Murderers of Our Time - Cawthorne, Nigel [100]
‘Fred said that there were two other bodies in shallow graves in the woods but there was no way they would ever be found,’ she told the interviewer. ‘He said there were twenty other bodies, not in one place but spread around and he would give police one a year. He told me the truth about the girls in the cellar and what happened to them so I don’t see why he would lie about other bodies.’
She also said that West had confessed to the murder of Mary Bastholm. She was one of two young woman ‘in shallow graves in the woods, but there was no way they would ever be found’.
‘No one has even scratched the surface of this case,’ said the documentary’s producer. ‘Social services had three hundred missing-people files and one hundred missing girls. There were two girls from Jordansbrook children’s home who were making a living as prostitutes from twenty-five Cromwell Street.’
The programme also described how West had told his solicitor that he believed ‘the spirits of his victims were coming up through the floor from the cellar where they were entombed’.
‘When they come up into you it’s beautiful,’ West is alleged to have said. ‘It’s when they go away you are trying to hold them, you feel them flying away from you and you try to stop them. You can’t send them back to where they were.’
Soon after this Rosemary West abandoned her appeal and told the press that she had resigned herself to spending the rest of her life in Durham’s high-security prison. She also apologised to her step-daughter Anne-Marie for ‘the abuse she suffered’ and expressed a desire to be reconciled to her.
Then, on 22 January 2003, the BBC reported that ‘the wedding between jailed serial killer Rose West and session musician Dave Glover has been called off – just days after it was announced. The pair have been writing to each other for a year, but Mr Glover is reported to have pulled out because of the publicity.’ Bass player Glover, 36, had been working regularly with the band Slade for 18 months, but his contract was then terminated.
A spokesman for the band said: ‘It has all come as an incredible shock. At no point had Dave Glover discussed this. It’s like marrying Hitler.’
West and Glover had announced their intention to marry on 19 January. Rose West explained that she wanted to give ‘this young man his life back’.
Chapter 18
Doctor Death
Name: Dr Harold Shipman
Nationality: English
Number of victims: 215+
Favoured method of killing: injecting pethidine/morphine
Born: 1946
Profession: GP
Married: yes
Reign of terror: early 1970s–98
Dr Harold Shipman is thought to be the most prolific serial killer ever. He is said to have killed at least 215 people and perhaps as many as 400 over a career of murder that lasted nearly 30 years. Yet he was an ordinary GP working in the English Midlands.
Born into a working-class family in Nottingham on 14 June 1946, Harold Frederick Shipman was known as Fred or Freddy. Although the family lived in a red-brick terraced council house like any other, under the influence of his mother, Vera, they set themselves apart from others.
‘Vera was friendly enough,’ said a neighbour. ‘But she really did see her family as superior to the rest of us. Not only that, you could tell Freddy was her favourite, the one she saw as the most promising of her three children.’
Shipman’s sister Pauline was seven years his senior, his brother Clive, four years younger than him. But he was the apple of his mother’s eye and she decided that it was Harold that was going make a success out of life. She also decided who Harold could play with and, to set him apart from the other boys, she insisted that he wore a tie while the others dressed more casually.
A confident and clever child, Shipman did well at junior school and was accepted by High Pavement Grammar school. There he failed to shine in the classroom, but made his way by dogged hard work.
Where he did shine was on